Sure, he’s the shortest regular of this century, but Jose Altuve has managed big things. Last year, he put up the second-best batting average of a second baseman in the free agency era, broke the Astros’ single-season record for hits, and showed the best pop of his career. A few changes to his game helped him be even better.

“Oh he’s always been this good, I remember when I first saw him in the Venezuelan Summer League and was amazed,” laughed his current hitting coach, Dave Hudgens. But he agreed that a small change to his batting stance over the last few years may have made a difference.

Here’s Altuve in 2013. Watch his front leg.

Here’s Altuve this year. Watch his front leg again.

See it? Altuve added a little bit of a more dramatic step with his front leg in early 2014. “Not too much, just a little,” Altuve said of the change. “I wanted to do an early step, not a big leg kick.”

The change has helped him in a couple different ways. “I recognize pitches earlier now that I’m doing that,” Altuve said. Hudgens agreed that the step has helped him start his entire swing and thinking process earlier. Altuve has always made a lot of contact — he’s in the top ten in contact rate this year — but his ability to make contact took a leap forward with the step.

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On the eve of this season, we at FanGraphs compiled our annual Positional Power Rankings, examining the projected depth charts at every position for every team. Things are very exciting at the top of these rankings — monitoring the center field situation for the Angels, for example, will be a thrill for the foreseeable future.

Also a thrill — at least for this impartial observer — was the situation at the very bottom of the same rankings. While just about every position for just about every team has been serviceably filled by the end of winter, a few slipped through the cracks here and there. Of the dozens of major league positions amongst the thirty teams, only four were projected to produce at below replacement level. Here we will examine just how things are going for those four positions, plus starting here with a fifth position that, while projected for marginally above replacement level, lagged remarkably behind the other 29 teams:

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The Boston Red Sox rotation began the season with some scrutiny as the starting five was filled with average to above average types and no pitcher resembling an ace. That scrutiny has turned to criticism as we near the end of the first month of the season and that rotation has allowed more runs than any other starting group in the American League and their 5.75 ERA is the worst in Major League Baseball. The rotation has gotten off to a terrible start, but the offense has produced and the Red Sox will still enter May with a winning record at 12-10. While a bloated ERA has generated calls for the Red Sox to make a trade for a starter, the current rotation has pitched better than its ERA would indicate. Going forward, the Red Sox rotation should get much better results than we have seen so far.

The Red Sox have given up a lot of runs, but the rotation’s FIP is a middle of the road 3.91. The Red Sox and Cleveland Indians are the only two rotations in MLB to have their ERA and FIP differ by more than one, and for the Red Sox that number is 1.84. The team’s walk rate at 8.8% is a little too high, but they make up for the high walk rate by striking out 22.9% of hitters. Their 14.9% K-BB rate is in the upper third of American League teams. Individually, there is not a single starter with a lower ERA than FIP.

In a more visual form:
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This is one of those posts I like to write over and over. We’re always getting new information, meaning we’re always getting new borderline calls, and when there’s room for error around the fringes, that means there’s a non-zero chance something could go more dreadfully wrong. Like, say, a pitch being taken down the middle, and getting called a ball. Humans are perfect at nothing, not even the things that we think we’re perfect at, and a baseball season has a whole lot of pitches in it. Lots of opportunities for funny, uncommon mistakes. When it occurs to me, I try to find them.

I don’t do it because I delight in pointing out when umpires mess up. I really don’t, because their job is harder than my job, and I don’t like to pile on. Everyone’s capable of stupid mistakes. I do it because, think about it. We’re used to seeing questionable calls around the edges. But, right down the middle? It’s the kind of mistake you want to investigate, because you feel like something must’ve happened. My goal when I do this is to try to understand why the call got made how it did. Find an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable. I don’t know why this interests me so much, but, here we are, and no one on staff has told me to stop.

We’ve had weeks of baseball in 2015. There’s nothing particularly significant about right now, but let’s reflect anyway on what’s taken place. Let’s search for those called balls on pitches taken down the middle.

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You shouldn’t need very much of an introduction. Beginning a few months ago, the Padres became one of the most interesting teams in baseball, totally out of the blue. The new front office completely overhauled a bad roster, and as a part of their maneuvering, they pretty clearly prioritized offensive punch over defensive capability. For a few weeks, now, the Padres have been playing games. It’s easy to see how they’ve done as a team. It’s easy to see how well they’ve been able to hit. Defensive performance is a little more hidden. So, let’s quickly check in on the Padres’ team defense.

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Before this post gets published, the White Sox and Orioles will begin a baseball game in Baltimore played before no one. The few scouts in attendance will keep to themselves, and those watching from elsewhere will be unheard. There will probably be birds, and birds are always making noise, but we’re generally pretty good at tuning them out, because they never shut up. Two things, before going further:

(1) Of course, what’s going on in the rest of Baltimore is of far greater significance than what’s going on inside Camden Yards. For every one thought about the baseball game, there ought to be ten million thoughts about the civil unrest, and what it means and what’s to learn. My job, though, is to write about baseball, and so this is a post about baseball. I am qualified to do very few other things.

(2) The game will be played under extraordinary circumstances, but it’s also one game. A sample of one is, for all intents and purposes, no better than a sample of zero, so we’re not going to learn much today. We’d need a few thousand of these to really research and establish some conclusions. The post basically concerns the hypothetical, inspired by what’s taking place.

Home-field advantage exists in all sports. It’s a known thing, to varying degrees. The first thing that occurs to most people, as far as an explanation is concerned, is that the team at home has people yelling in support of it. The team on the road, meanwhile, has people yelling other things at it. The average person prefers support over mean and critical remarks. Now, consider the game in Baltimore. Strip the crowd effect away completely. What could that do? What might we expect of the home-field advantage of a team that plays with no fans?

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When the Giants watched Pablo Sandoval leave as a free agent this off-season, they didn’t really have any internal replacements ready to take his place at third base. With most of their money allocated towards re-signing pitchers Jake Peavy, Ryan Vogelsong, and Sergio Romo, the team ended up bargain-hunting for a new third baseman. They found their man in Miami, importing Casey McGehee from the Marlins, as they continue to be a franchise that emphasizes hitting for contact; McGehee’s primary calling card as a big leaguer.

Preferring this skill has worked out well for the Giants over the years, leading them to underrated players like Angel Pagan, Marco Scutaro, Joe Panik, and Nori Aoki. While other teams have chased power in an environment where it has become ever more scarce, the Giants have been content to single their way to three World Series titles. So while McGehee is an unconventional third baseman — he hit just four home runs last year — the Giants targeting an underpowered contact hitter shouldn’t have been a huge surprise.

Unfortunately for the Giants, the beginning of McGehee’s career in San Francisco has been a disaster. After an 0-3 performance on Tuesday night, he’s now hitting .160/.207/.255, and if you can believe it, he’s actually been even worse than that line would suggest, because BA/OBP/SLG don’t account for the extra harm that comes from hitting into double plays. And nobody in baseball hits into double plays like Casey McGehee.

McGehee has already hit into eight twin killings this year; no one else has done more than five times, so he leads the league in GIDPs even though he hasn’t actually played enough games to qualify for the batting title yet. That McGehee is leading the double play charge shouldn’t be a huge surprise, however, as he hit into a whopping 31 double plays last year, tied for the eighth highest single season total in Major League history.

McGehee is basically the perfect storm of a double play candidate. He specializes in making contact and hitting ground balls, only unlike most guys who pound the ball into the ground, he’s remarkably slow. McGehee has the batted profile of a leadoff hitter and the foot-speed of a designated hitter; if he comes up with a man on first base and less than two outs, there’s a pretty good chance that two outs are on their way.

So when you take into account the negative value of the extra outs McGehee is making by hitting into double plays — and at FanGraphs, we have a metric called RE24 that does just that — we find that he’s been the very worst offensive player in baseball to date, some 12 runs below a league average performer. That’s kind of remarkable, considering he’s only played in 16 games. While the Giants early-season struggles are not solely McGehee’s fault, no one has done more to single-handedly bring down their team’s ability to score runs than the Giants third baseman.

Unfortunately, the Giants still don’t really have an alternative at third base; that’s why they had to trade for McGehee in the first place. So, the team is probably just going to have to keep running him out there and hope he turns it around, but since he’s going to be in the line-up, they should think about doing something to reduce the likelihood of McGehee threatening Jim Rice’s single-season double play record (36), set back in 1984. Since there’s no real good alternative if they benched him, I’d instead like to suggest something even more radical; make him the leadoff hitter.

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I attended the Oakland A’s game last night, something I do a few dozen times a year, and Sonny Gray happened to be on the mound plying his trade against a talented Anaheim squad. Though he was shaky in the first inning (his career ERA in the first inning is 4.50, so there could be something to that), he settled down to go eight innings with two earned runs, six hits, one walk, and six strikeouts. He was efficient, looked like an ace, and the A’s won the game.

I moved to the Bay Area just before Sonny Gray was getting his first shot in the majors. In relation to how many games I’ve gone to in Oakland, I’ve witnessed an inordinately high number of his starts in person, so I’ve been able to witness how he’s grown and evolved as a pitcher over the past few years. As April comes to an end, I’m confident enough in those changes to finally write about them. To frame our discussion, let’s begin with a chart of Gray’s fastball usage (separated by type), from the time he was promoted in 2013 until now:

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By framing runs above average on StatCorner, Chris Iannetta was 54th of 78 catchers that caught at least 1000 pitches last year. This year, he’s first. All it took was a little studying. After reading up, a little twist of the butt and a new relaxation technique was enough to change the fortunes of a 32-year-old backstop.

Some credit should go to Hank Conger, really. Because of his exacting manager, and his own inquisitive mind, Conger has spent a lot of time reading up on the best catching techniques. Conger admitted that he’d read all about where Jason Castro said he put his butt in order to give the umpire a better look at lefties.

And Conger made sure Iannetta knew what he knew. “We talked about it a lot,” admitted Iannetta about framing and his former teammate. “We talked about it in the offseason. We texted. We talked about it all spring.”

One of the things they talked about was the positioning that Jeff Sullivan spotted. “I have wider shoulders, so I have to make sure they can see around me,” Iannetta said. “I try to angle my body, I’ve tried angling my body a little.”

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Joc Pederson does not fit the traditional “three true outcomes” profile visually. Listed at 6-foot-one and 185 pounds, Pederson plays center field and is a far cry from the lumbering slugger personified most in Adam Dunn over the past decade. However, Pederson has been a high walk, high strikeout player with decent power throughout his minor league career with some very good comps and that has carried over so far in Major League Baseball in the early part of the season.

Over the past three seasons, Pederson has moved quickly and steadily to the three true outcomes looking at the level where he received the most plate appearances in each season.
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